A Strong and Handsome Brute
by The Green Archer
Summary: Belle learns a surprising secret about the Bimbettes while walking home from the bookshop. One-shot, based off a prompt challenge.


_A/N: This fanfic was based off a prompt on the Bittersweet and Strange forum. The challenge was to write a scene or story that interprets something in the movie in a way that the audience isn't meant to interpret it. Hope you enjoy!_

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On a cool but sunny day in late September, Belle walked out of Monsieur Poncelet's bookshop with a brand new leather-bound book under her arm. A new shipment of fairy tales had arrived at the bookstore earlier that week, and Belle being the avid reader that she was, wanted to read as many of them as possible before evening arrived and she had to make dinner for her father. It hadn't been her first choice to move to a poor provincial town after her mother's passing, but a bookshop within walking distance, with a bookkeeper who let her borrow his merchandise for free was definitely one of the perks. Books were a refreshing escape from reality, especially when Belle couldn't seem to make friends with anyone else in her quiet village.

Belle had only walked a few doors down from the bookshop however, when she spotted someone who put all her thoughts on reading on hold. Gaston. Great. The one person she didn't want to see now.

Belle was still a newcomer to the village, but she already knew that Gaston – the famous town hunter – was someone she couldn't stand in the least. She wasn't sure what she hated about him more; his overinflated ego, or the fact that he seemed to be under the delusion that she had feelings for him. They had nothing in common past the fact they lived in the same village, yet every time he saw her, he was always inviting her to his tavern, clearly trying to woo her the same he wooed the Salaun triplets. It made Belle sick just thinking about it. Gaston had no personality outside his ego and no interest in women outside of how they benefited him, personally. She refused to be another trophy to hang on his wall. Spending time with him was the last thing she wanted to do in this village.

Luckily for Belle, escape came in the form of a gap between the Hemon's house and the metalsmith's shop on her left. She quickly slipped between two houses and pressed herself against the brick wall, hoping he hadn't noticed…

"Why hello, gorgeous," said a voice.

She flinched. _Great. So much for that plan._ Now she'd be wasting ten minutes trying to talk Gaston out of going back to the tavern with him. A full ten minutes she could have spent reading her new book, if only she hadn't taken the main road back to the house...

She looked up, expecting to come face to face with Gaston's enormous chin, but to her surprise, he wasn't there. Peering over the wall, she almost gasped at what she saw. Gaston was staring at his reflection in one the pans on display in front of the metalsmith's house, flexing his muscles and striking what she believed was a flirtatious pose at himself. Unbelieveable. If Belle needed a picture definition of what a narcissist looked like, the image of Gaston posing for his reflection was all she needed.

"Gaston, we have to go!" LeFou interrupted, appearing behind the hunter with a burlap sack in tow.

Gaston turned away from the pan and glared at his lackey, clearly annoyed by his untimely appearance. "Alright, alright!" he replied, begrudgingly. "I'm coming!" He accompanied LeFou down the street, passing Belle's hiding place without a second glance. Belle sighed in relief. She was safe.

"It's too bad M. Lefebvre doesn't charge Gaston every time he admires himself in those pans of his," a feminine voice said behind her.

"How much money do you think he'd make if he did?" a second voice inquired.

"Enough money to move out of this place, that's for sure," a third voice replied.

The three speakers laughed in unison. Belle spun around, surprised. It seemed that in her haste to avoid Gaston, she hadn't noticed that she wasn't the only one who'd picked the metalsmith's shop as a hiding spot. The Salaun triplets were sitting against the wall across from her, all wearing huge smiles on their faces.

"Marie-Claude, Marie-Laure, Marie-Paule!" she said to them in disbelief. "What are you doing here?"

"Watching Gaston of course," replied the triplet in the red dress, Marie-Claude. "It's one of our absolute _favourite _pastimes."

"He's very entertaining when he thinks no one's paying attention to him," added Marie-Laure, who was wearing an amber dress.

"And hilarious," said her sister, Marie-Paule, who was dressed in green.

"And stupid," said Marie-Claude.

"But I don't understand," Belle said incredulously. "I thought you three were... crazy about Gaston." Every time she saw them with him in public, they were practically swooning over him. What on earth were they talking about?

"Belle, you're new here, so I think you may have the wrong impression about us," Marie-Claude explained. "Of course we _adore _Gaston, but we'd be stupid to centre our entire lives around him. We have hobbies, just like you do! I study astronomy and chart stars in my free time. Paule over here grows her own herbs to make medicine. She thinks she may have even come up with a tonic that will make pain more bearable for women during childbirth. And Laure is a painter."

"Women aren't supposed to paint their own portraits without a male teacher's supervision," Marie-Laure revealed to Belle. "I said nuts to that! I told Gaston that we had an artist cousin from Paris who was staying with us for a week and did full body commissions. Of course, Gaston couldn't _resist _the chance to have his beautiful physique captured on canvas. So the day our cousin was supposed to arrive, I took some discarded clothes from the patrons in the tavern and came to Gaston's house, pretending to be him. As long as I told Gaston to pose for him, he didn't even seem to care that his painter was a bit on the small size. And now my painting's in the tavern, right above the fireplace."

Belle was speechless. "You painted that portrait? Disguised as a boy?" She'd only seen Gaston's portrait once when she went to the tavern with her father to buy some baking ingredients, but she'd never guessed that one of the triplets was behind it. She may not have liked the subject of the portrait, but she couldn't deny... it was a _very _good likeness.

"Mhmm," Marie-Laure said, seeing Belle's surprise. "And I got double the commission fee on it, too. One of the benefits of working with a commissioner who's not that great at numbers."

At the mention of Gaston, Belle remembered the main subject of their discussion. "But you're..."

"Ditzy?" Marie-Claude said, reading her mind.

"Coquettish?" said Marie-Laure, batting her eyelashes flirtatiously.

"Silly?" said Marie-Paule, making a face.

"It's all an act," Marie-Claude explained. "Of course we know that Gaston is full of himself, but with a body like that, who _wouldn't _want to marry him? But we can't let him see that we're smarter than him, because then he won't want to marry _any_ of us_._"

"Men don't want to be outsmarted by a woman you see, it's totally embarrassing!" Marie-Laure elaborated. "They like someone who's meek, submissive and doesn't talk a lot."

"So we act dumb and flirty around him now, because it will improve our marriage prospects," Marie-Paule concluded.

"Wait a minute," said Belle. "You're saying that you're all pretending to act... dumb, just so you can marry Gaston? Even though you think he's full of himself?"

"Well, no. Just until he proposes marriage to one of us," Marie-Paule clarified. "Then we can act smart again because Gaston will _think_ his marriage to us made us _smart._ So it's a win-win situation for everyone, right?"

Belle raised an eyebrow, dubiously. "But what if Gaston doesn't want a wife who's smart, even after he marries?" she asked them. "What if he just wants someone who can cook and clean for him all the time?"

"Oh, Belle, _all _unmarried men say that," Marie-Claude giggled. "But deep down inside, what they really want is an _intelligent_ wife. They just don't admit it aloud because it would damage their precious reputation."

"Besides. Once we get old and our good looks leave us, what else will Gaston be able to boast about?" said Marie-Paule. "Any simpleton can learn to cook and clean. But not every man can brag about how _witty_ their wife is."

"But if he _does _have a problem with our talents," said Marie-Laure, "Well, who says that women can't have power in a marriage too? It's just a matter of pulling the right strings, if you know what I mean."

"Of course you've got nothing to worry about, do you Belle?" said Marie-Paule. "Miss big brown eyes and high cheekbones. With beauty like yours, you don't have to follow _any_ of those silly courtship rules."

"Plus you've turned him down half-a-dozen times already," Marie-Claude pointed out. "No wonder he thinks you're so irresistible. You're a _natural _seductress."

Hearing the girls call her a "natural seductress" Belle stood up in anger. "I'm not interested in him!" she retorted. "And I'm not trying to seduce him; I'm trying to _avoid _him. I don't want anything to do with him!"

"Whatever you say, Belle," Marie-Paule said, rolling her eyes. "But if I were you, I'd be careful about how I act around him from now on. If you keep playing hard to get with him like this, he'll be asking you to marry him for sure. There's nothing a man loves more than a woman who always refuses him."

Belle's face contorted in disgust. She couldn't stand the idea of being near Gaston, why on earth would he think that she wanted to marry _him? _All she'd done since she arrived at the village was distance herself from him – a clear sign that she wanted him to go away, not come closer. "I have to go," she said to the girls, deciding she wanted no further part in this conversation.

"Oh, Belle, wait!" Marie-Laure called out. "You have the most exquisite eyes. I'd love to do a sketching of you, if you'd like to come over sometime."

Belle considered that. "Alright, sure." There was no harm in helping Marie-Laure out with something she loved doing. That, and it would give Belle an excuse to get out of the house for a while. She smiled politely at the triplets and continued on her way.

Returning to the main road, which was now free of Gaston, Belle thought about her discussion with the Salaun girls and their unusual ideas of courtship and marriage. Taken as a whole, she was quite surprised. She already knew that Gaston's view of women was largely flawed, but it seemed that the triplets had some pretty shallow ideas of what men wanted in a relationship, too. Not that Belle believed she was completely above them, of course. After all, she spent her time reading books about people who fell in love with each other at first sight – hardly something that occurred in real life. Still, was it really wrong to believe that there was someone out there who could love her for her, and not because she followed some strange, social script? Belle had believed in true love since her childhood, but her discussion with the Salaun triplets only strengthened her belief that no one in her village shared in that notion. Marriage was just something people took part in because they had to. Nothing more, nothing less.

Shaking her head, Belle opened her new book and started to read. There, she was soon transported into a magical world, free of Gaston, the triplets and the confusion of her provincial life. In time, she forgot the entire conversation with the triplets ever took place.

That was, until a month later, when Gaston came to her house, asking for her hand in marriage.


End file.
